The Lion in Autumn
Read The Lion in Autumn Online
Authors: Frank Fitzpatrick
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First Electronic edition, September 2005
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Copyright © 2005 by Frank Fitzpatrick
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FOR GENE DOWNS AND RON MAR-ELIA,
Good Friends gone too soon.
Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither;
Ripeness is all.
â
King Lear
(Act V, Scene II)
JOE PATERNO COULDN'T SLEEP.
That was hardly surprising. Heading into the next afternoon's game with Northwestern, their ninth of the 2004 season, his Nittany Lions were a recipe for coaching insomnia. No matter what he tried, no matter how hard he worked, he just couldn't seem to turn them around.
But the Penn State coach's nature wouldn't permit surrender. And so, sometime before dawn on November 6, a brisk Saturday in State College, Pennsylvania, Paterno decided that rather than twitch around in bed for another hour, he'd review the game plan one last time.
He rose and proceeded down the hall to the den in the modest ranch house that had been his home now for nearly four decades. The four-bedroom house on McKee Street was just a few tree-lined blocks from the northern edge of the university's fifteen-thousand-acre campus, a twenty-minute walk from Beaver Stadium. Its backyard bordered Sunset Park, where even now, fifty days short of his seventy-eighth birthday, the coach would take brisk strolls along its tree-shrouded paths.
Paterno plucked a copy of the game plan off his desk and sat down. How could he squeeze more out of an offense that was by almost any measure his feeblest ever? He'd been pushing the envelope
for weeks. For most of his fifty-four years of coaching, Penn State had won with a knock-'em-back simplicityâat times the only variation seemed to be which blocking hole the tailback would run toward. But the game plan he examined now had quarterbacks lined up at wide receiver, tight end, even tailback. There were fullback passes, faked field goals, and flea flickers.
What else could he do? Four weeks earlier, in a home loss to Purdue, his Nittany Lions had run the ball only seventeen times, the fewest ever in the Paterno era. They gained a paltry 18 yards.
By the time the morning sun angled through the den's high windows, he had made several changes. Restless, obsessively prepared, Paterno had performed this same kind of early-morning editing on dozens of Saturdays throughout his years at Penn State. “The will to win is important,” he liked to say. “The willingness to prepare is vital.” This time, however, he sensed that something in his well-ordered universe was out of place. He just couldn't identify exactly what it was.
Searching, he shifted in his chair and surveyed the room. Everywhere he looked he saw the familiar artifacts of the life he had chosen: the small den in the small house in the small town he had refused to abandon despite dozens of tempting offers; the photographs of his wife, his five children, his fourteen young grandchildren, his countless friends, and the former players who had gone on to the NFL, medical school, even the concert stage; the footballs, plaques, and trophies he had earned by winning 341 gamesâmore than any other coach in history except oneâall of them won, as his legion of supporters bragged, the right way.
Then he saw the problem.
Just beneath those elevated windows was a trophy shelf. Long ago, Paterno, a devout Catholic, had placed a crucifix up there, too, perhaps an attempt to ensure that he would not awake one day and find that his long and brilliant career had been a dream. Whenever he worked in the room on sunny mornings, the shadow of that crucifix fell comfortingly upon him.
Recently, though, he'd been so obsessed with redeeming himself and his program that he hadn't noticed the absence of the reassuring shadow. Someone had moved the cross (probably his wife while
cleaning). He wondered how long it had been missing. Weeks? Years? Maybe that explained Penn State's baffling fall from its once preordained spot high in the national rankings. He had coached five undefeated teams, won two national championships and four coach-of-the-year awards, led his teams to thirty-one bowl appearances. But in the last five years, his teams had lost more often than they'd won. He needed to change his luck.
So he climbed up on a chair and reached for the trophy that now obscured the crucifix. It was the Timmie Award, which the Washington (D.C.) Touchdown Club had presented him in 1986 as its Coach of the Year. It was a twelve-pound, silver-plated depiction of an adolescent football player standing on a solid wooden base, and as he held it in his hands it seemed heavier than he had remembered.
Suddenly, the trophy slipped from his grasp and, like one more well-aimed arrow of misfortune, tumbled toward his head.
It clipped the scalp behind his left ear and he staggered. He braced himself to prevent a fall and muttered something angrily in that whiny Brooklyn accent he had never lost. Carefully stepping down, he pressed a hand against the fresh wound. The blood was flowing now, warm and plentiful. He was cut, not badly, but deep enough to ensure a hospital visit.
As he woke his wife to drive him to Penn State's Health Center, where they would sew eleven stitches behind his ear, he knew that the damn sportswriters would find out. He could imagine the next morning's headline in the
Centre Daily Times
: PATERNO INJURED BY FALLING TROPHY WHILE TRYING TO MOVE CRUCIFIX.
No one's going to believe this,
he thought.
Actually, anyone who had been following Paterno and his Penn State football team in 2004 would have found it perfectly plausible. In the midst of another troubling season, he had been reaching for some spiritual comfort. Instead, he got smacked in the head by his glorious past.
That early-morning mishap explained a lot about Joe Paterno in 2004.
After nearly thirty-nine years as Penn State's head coach, he
remained restless, curious, devoted, competitive, and superstitious. His luck had been bad almost since the moment a Minnesota receiver had grasped a desperate fourth-down pass against his second-ranked team in 1999. And as his persistent but loving critics pointed out at every opportunity, he was, in many ways, a fragile old man.
By the fall of 2004, Paterno's age and the deflated status of Nittany Lions' football had combined to create an unusually volatile atmosphere in State College. Troubling questions tumbled through central Pennsylvania's crisp autumn air like falling leaves. Would the old coach yield to reality and bow out gracefully? Or would he stubbornly hang on until he keeled over on Beaver Stadium's Kentucky-bluegrass sideline? Could so powerful a figure ever be persuaded to step aside? Or at least agree on a successor? If so, who might that be? His son Jay? Coordinators Tom Bradley or Galen Hall or someone from outside the program like Rick Neuheisel or Kirk Ferentz? Would Paterno at least reveal his plans at some point? And what would happen to the university's donations, applications, and prestige if he left? Or, worse, if he continued to lose?
There were no easy answers. Paterno's résumé was bulletproof. Time, tenure, and testimonials seemed to place the coach beyond the normal reach of authority. He had been at Penn State since 1950, when the Lions ran a Wing-T and played before crowds of fifteen thousand on a dusty field next door to Rec Hall. He had been head coach since 1966. In addition to the 341 games and the two national championships, he'd won nearly universal admiration for the classy program he'd built, one that had graduated eighty-six percent of its players and sent nearly three hundred of them to the NFL. His passion, intelligence, and commitment had helped transform an obscure agricultural college into a multifaceted Big Ten research institution, one that attracted topflight students and professors, deep-pocketed donors, and national respect. He'd rejected law school, countless NFL offers, and even politics to remain at the university.
In the process, he had become a national icon, the antidote to all that was toxic in college sports. He was “JoePa,” Penn State's greatest asset. “Joe Paterno,” former Penn State president John Oswald once
said, “is a university president's dream.” He was a towering figure in American sports, a Pennsylvania folk hero as solid and immovable as Mount Nittany itself.
But this unprecedented Penn State slump that began in 2000 and lingered on like a bad dream for five seasons now had eroded Mount JoePa's reputation. Losing had pulled back the curtain on Paterno's wizardry, revealing him to many as a stubborn, aging mortal. His supporters still outnumbered his detractors by a wide margin, but the gap was narrowing every day. Students, alumni, donors, fans, and sportswriters urged him to step aside. For the good of the football program. For the good of Penn State. For the good of Joe Paterno. Some of Paterno's more powerful foes had begun, according to the
Wilkes-Barre Times Leader
, “letter-writing campaigns, secret meetings in dark, smoke-filled rooms, even boycotts of the traditional post-home-game pasta dinners at the Paterno home.”
“I agree that Joe has more than earned the right to go out on his terms, but there comes a point in all of our lives when you look in the mirror and say, âIt's time,'Â ” a major Penn State donor told the paper. “Besides, and I know this is going to sound disrespectful, people aren't coming to that stadium every week because our library is rated number one in the nation. That's nice and all, but we'd still like to beat Michigan.”
In the autumn of 2004, Happy Valley, long the capital of college-football optimism, had become a different place. A half century of certainty had been replaced by doubt. There had been no Big Ten titles since 1994, no nonconference road wins since 1999, just one bowl game in the last five years, and very few mentions on ESPN, unless it was some hand-waving ex-jock poking fun at Paterno's age. Even the huge crowds at Beaver Stadium had shrunk lately, down by four thousand a game.
The moral superiority Penn Staters had long felt about their pristine football program was crumbling too. While the team's graduation rate remained remarkably high, there had been so many disturbing off-the-field incidents involving players in 2003 that at times it was hard to distinguish Penn State from an outlaw program. At least
eleven Nittany Lions had run-ins with the law that season. Worse, Paterno sometimes seemed willing to excuse, perhaps even hide, their transgressions.
“Penn State football is supposed to matter, as much as anything in sports can,” said Ryan Jones, a â95 grad, early in the 2004 season. “We boast proud traditions and a coach and a program that still stand for things most coaches and programs don't. But we're not relevant anymore, and life was a little bit better when we were.”
Most fans, their pride stung no less than the coach's, wanted assurances that the Penn State tradition would be reborn. If Paterno could do it, all the better. But if, as many now were convinced, he could not, then significant change was essential. And at Penn State, significant change could only mean one thing.
The detractors had hoped he might walk away when his contract expired after the 2004 season. But the previous May, at his request, the coach received a four-year contract extension, a deal set to run through his eighty-second birthday in 2008. The new contract virtually guaranteed that no one was going to tell him when to retire. Armed with that formidable club, Paterno could laughingly shrug off inquiries about his plans. He was not, he said, “ready to be buried.”
The extension was, depending on one's view of Paterno, either a nice gesture or a national embarrassment.
“It's disappointing,” said Paul Morrison, one of the first Nittany Lion Club boosters to call publicly for a coaching change. “I just haven't seen the performance on or off the field for the past handful of years. I was hoping to see a change of direction, someone new with more youth and energy.”
“I know where I am and I think that if the day comes when I feel like I'm not able to do the job or the game's passed me by or I can't get up with a lot of enthusiasm . . . I don't have to stay in coaching,” Paterno said. “I can get out of it. But I don't feel that way right now.”
As the new season dawned, the apparently unbridgeable gap between what many alumni and fans felt was necessary and what was actually possible was wider than ever. That bred frustration, which led to more angry letters, e-mails, and radio-talk-show calls.
“I think, honestly, Joe has to realize at some point that he needs
to kind of hang things up here and try to leave while he can still have some kind of good reputation,” Skip Dreibelbis, a former Penn State player, said on a State College postgame radio show, where the coach's detractors tended to gather. “Because if things continue this downward spiral that they're in, what's going to become of Penn State football?”
Paterno's supporters were, if not as persistently noisy, just as passionate. Their fortress was the State College Quarterback Club, a hardcore group of local loyalists who had been conducting casual weekly lunch meetings with the coach for decades.
“He deserves to be handled differently than anyone else,” said Jim Meister, the club's president. “He put Penn State on the map. No matter where you are, if you mention Penn State, people will say, âIsn't that where Joe Paterno is?'Â ”
That renown tinges the debate with sadness. No one enjoyed watching Paterno tarnish his image, even if he insisted he was unaffected by it all. But what do you do when a legend falters?
“Years ago,” Paterno said, “when I came home crying that somebody called me a Wop, I said âMom' “âhe pretends to be cryingâ“Â âthey called me a Wop.' She said, âSticks and stones will break your bones but names will never hurt you.' All of that is fine. As long as they don't call me a Wop in the paper, I'm all right.”
That was about the only thing they didn't call him. Long college football's most revered figure, the aging coach was becoming the butt of jokes. And not just in Pennsylvania. In Biloxi, Mississippi, a reader wrote that city's
Sun-Herald:
“More ugly rumors out of the Big Ten: allegations Joe Paterno once gave a recruit a free stagecoach.” From
The Miami Herald
's Greg Cote came: “Did you notice last week? Poor Paterno coached the entire game with his left blinker on.” A Toronto newspaper had initiated a “JoePa Award,” to be presented annually “to those whose reputations are sullied by hanging around too long.”